Sunday 28 September 2014

Alan Bennett's "evolution revolution"

If you search for "evoluton revoluton" and one of the things that comes up these days is Alan Bennett's book, titled:

Evolution Revolution: Evolution is True. Darwin is Wrong. This Changes Everything.

This is apparently a book about evo-devo and complexity theory.

I would give "evo-devo" 1/10 for its revolutionary qualities. Complexity theory gets a 6/10 from me on this scale - with the proviso that the revolution dates back to the 1980s. I was taught it at university, and it's been orthodoxy for decades now.

The blurb for this book claims that: "Evolution is simply change over time". That is one definition - but it isn't a definition that makes it a scientific theory. The point of Darwinism was that it made predictions and was refutable. The idea that "evolution is simply change over time" makes "evolution" into an unscientific concept.

I skimmed the book. The contents are of poor quality. It offers a revisionist history of Darwinism. This is a conspiracy theorists book about evolutionary theory. That's unfortunate. I like the "evoluton revoluton" meme. I don't like seeing it being given a bad name in this way.

Oh well, at least Alan Bennet's book is better than Spetner and Shapiro's The Evolution Revolution. That one's a creationist tract!

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